Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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the United States is one of the leading world centers of international
terrorism, perhaps the leading center, but this fact and the evidence that
demonstrates it are under a strict ban and can never be permitted
expression to a mass audience. 94
Claims about “captured weapons from the Soviet bloc” should always
be inspected with a skeptical eye. Consider, for example, the arms
cache “discovered” in Venezuela in 1963 and presented by the US
government, with the press loyally trailing along, as proof of Cuban
subversion. Arthur Schlesinger described this “great cache of weapons”
as ‘‘unquestionably Cuban in origin and provenance, secreted for
terrorists at a point along the Caribbean coast,” sure proof of the “central
threat” posed by Castro to the Americas. But former CIA agent Joseph
Smith, in a book written in defense of the CIA after Philip Agee’s
exposures had appeared, writes that the cache may have been a CIA
plant inspired by Kennedy’s anti-Castro crusade, including the terrorist
war against Cuba (which Schlesinger does not mention, and which has
largely been kept under wraps until today in the mainstream). The
public relations director of the United Fruit company, while outlining the
success of the company’s campaign to control the press at the time of
the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala, observes that “the phony weapons
ploy” was “used in Guatemala in ’54” as in Vietnam through the 1960s.
He also describes a plan he presented to the government of Honduras
“to place some Russian weapons in the hands of dead Salvadorian
soldiers [during the 1969-70 Honduras-El Salvador conflict], and then
to announce the ‘discovery’ of these weapons to the press, with pictures,
at the next news conference.” “Chinese weapons would be even better,”
he adds. 95
Returning to the US government case against Nicaragua, apart from
the worthless July 1984 document, the weakness of the government
case is illustrated by the attempt of the Kissinger Commission to